Hello, Dolly!
by Light My Crazy Diamond
Summary: #004. Hello, Dolly! Starring: Ness and Yoshi. A toy from Ness's childhood comes to life and attempts to supplant Yoshi as his best friend by turning the dinosaur into a less-than-favorable doll.
1. Hello, Dolly! 1

**#004. Hello, Dolly!**

Starring:  
Ness  
Yoshi

* * *

"BLLLAARARARARA! LISTEN UP, EVERYONE! IS EVERYONE LISTENING? HELLO, HELLO, HELLO, HOW LOW? I JUST MADE A REFERENCE BLLLLAARRRRGH! DID ANYONE GET THAT? ANYHOOTIEANDTHEBLOWFISH SINCE MASTER HAND IS STILL ONLY GONNA RETURN AN EVENT MATCH LATER I, HIS CRAZIER BROTHER, IS MAKING THE ANNOUCNEMENT! AND THE ANNOUNCEMENT IS THAT OUR ANNUAL DONATE YOUR TOY THING IS COMING UP! EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT IT BUT FOR EXPOSITIONAL PURPOSES I WILL EXPLAIN! THAT EVERY YEAR EACH SMASHER MUST DONATE AT LEAST ONE TOY TO A CHARITY ORGANIZATION THAT COLLECTS YOUR UNWANTED BAGGAGE FOR SNOTNOSED LITTLE BUGGERS! SO BE SURE TO COLLECT YOUR DONATION BOX FROM THE ATRIUM AND PUT YOUR TOY IN IT BY FRIDAY ELEVEN-FIFTYNINE! AND STUFF! GARABOOGAHYUGALOOGA CRAZY OUT! BRRAAPPPBAPBAPBAPBAP DO YOU KNOW CATS HAVE TWO VOCAL CORDS, ONE FOR PURRING AND THE OTHER FOR MEOWING? I DIDN'T! LMAOMAOMAOLMAOMAO I MISS MY BROTHER!"

The announcement finally ended there with a rude explosion of static.

"You know, I think Master Hand would have a much easier time getting us to pay attention during his announcements if he put Crazy in charge of reading them," Yoshi finally spoke up after he and Ness were finished rolling around on Ness's giant Onett-themed carpet, the last of their suffocating laughter wheezing out of their lungs. "Did _you_ know that cats have two sets of vocal cords?"

"No, no, I'm more of a dog person," Ness replied, a wide smile still splitting the cheeks of his red face as he sat back up. He shook his head, and, in a slightly more serious tone this time, said, "I totally forgot that the Give-A-Toy thing was this week, though. Remind me to go out and buy something on Friday, will ya?"

"But you have plenty of toys here!" Yoshi motioned with a sweep of his hand the entire room. "You've got your UFOs and Sky Runner –" Yoshi pointed to the part of the ceiling directly above Ness's bed, where the plush spaceships hung from on nearly-invisible wires "– your Bionic Slingshot, which you never use anyway –" Yoshi nodded his head to futuristic launching toy resting comfortably on one of Ness's shelf "– your Starman –" Yoshi got up and briefly placed his hand on the shiny, chrome figurine striking a proud pose on Ness's desk "– among countless others." Yoshi concluded his attempts at convincing Ness he need not spend extra money (which was totally not a thinly-disguised narrative technique to give some visual context to Ness's room while also paying as much homage to one of the best games of all time as possible) by plopping down on a giant Tessie beanbag, wrapping her long neck around his chest and squeezing it in plushy comfort.

"I told you, Yoshi, I need them for the décor," Ness sighed as he leaned back, gazing, perhaps in recollection of some fond memories, at each of the items Yoshi had pointed out. He hesitated, then suddenly brought his legs closer to his chest. "Hey, this reminds me. I got something from my sister just yesterday. Says she found it while she was looking through the attic for her old books."

"Oh? And what is it?" Yoshi asked, fixing Ness with a curious eye as he nestled into a more comfortable position in the beanbag.

"It's…" Ness reached under his bed. He strained his arm while patting the area under his bed, closing one eye and sticking out his tongue; then his expression brightened instantly as his hand smacked what he was looking for. "… _This_!" he revealed with a triumphant flourish as he dragged his arm from the bed and thrust his fist in front of Yoshi's face.

Yoshi tilted back slightly to better see what was in Ness's hand. "A _doll_?"

"Pfft. _Doll_ , he says," Ness smirked as he receded his arm and held the "doll" to his face. As his eyes found better adjustment on the object, Yoshi could see that the "doll" was, indeed, more in line with one of those action figures endlessly popular with little boys – a coating of brown plastic that sheened in the light, jointed arms and legs capable of striking a myriad of flashy poses, an expression of hardened confidence declaring war on all and any who dared oppose its justice. "Forgive him, Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron. He doesn't know you were only the coolest thing in the 90s."

"Childhood toy, I'm presuming?" Yoshi said as he took the toy from Ness.

"Yep! Every boy had one back in Eagleland. He's a super cool cyborg monkey who was mutated with some cybnetic enhancements after a meteorite crashed into him while an experiment was going horribly wrong. The cartoon series has him fighting off the Evil Alien Dinosaurs from Venus using all his hi-tech body mods. Here, let me show you –" Ness leaned forward and clicked a switch on the monkey's right arm. Immediately the forearm lifted up to reveal a sleek, gray tube, its wide mouth gaping where its fist was moment before. "It's not doing anything right now because I didn't put in any batteries, but it sucks stuff into that tube to blast it as ammo. Totally cool."

Yoshi held the figure up to his eye and peered into the tube. "Ha! Kind of reminds me of Samus, actually. You know, like her arm cannon?"

"Yeah. They actually have different series of Monkeytrons that come with different weapons and stuff. This is the one my mom bought me, and comes equipped with a Vacuum Gun and Inky Dinky Shrink Ray." Ness tapped the other arm of the action figure. "Which, granted, might not sound as cool as Heat Seeking Missile Launcher and Plasmatic Magnet Beam Monkeytron that Jeff was telling me he had, but he makes up for it with _this_." Ness seized the Monkeytron from Yoshi, turned him around so that his back was facing the dinosaur, and pressed another switch that was right above his tail. Immediately the top portion of the tail lifted up, just like the forearm – only this time, it revealed a gleaming stick of metal whose point was as sharp as an icepick.

"Holy Goonie!" Yoshi cried, jumping back in shock and hitting the back of his head against the wall, as though Ness had brandished a switchblade knife in his face instead. "What the _hell_? Is that real? That looks like something you could use to perform a lobotomy!"

"You know what, you're right," Ness said as he looked down at the tool of murder in his hand. "I guess that explains why they had to recall these particular editions later on… But hey, it's not like they actually hurt anyone," Ness hastily added as he grinned and swung the monkey with its sheathed tail dangerously close to Yoshi's nose. "No bloodshed in the world of Nintendo, remember?"

"Hello? Are you forgetting something?" Yoshi asked incredulously, before sticking out his tongue and fiercely pointing to it.

"That was just a freak occurrence of nature. Doesn't count."

"Yeah… Well, listen – can you keep that piece of junk now, please? You're making me feel uncomfortable here." Yoshi rolled his eyes in annoyance as Ness complied, but not without an infuriating smirk of condescension stretching his lips. "I hope you're not thinking of donating that thing, because some poor kid is going to have his eye poked out if you do."

"Give away a limited edition, dangerously cool Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron? Are you out of your mind?" Ness shook his head as he threw the action figure atop his bed. "I told you to remind me to go out and buy something on Friday. My dad still deposits tons of cash into my bank account, anyway, so the money's not a problem."

"Right…" Yoshi stared, still slightly disconcerted, at the figure lying on its side, thrown such that it faced the wall away from them, before shaking his head and saying, in a more upbeat, positive note, "Anyway! So, how do you wanna kick off this morning? Toony's invited us to sail the oceans with him… Lucas is gonna go and visit some Dragos… Peach is holding a flower arrangement ceremony sometime in the evening…"

Ness briefly pondered the wealth of possibilities as he buried his mouth into the circle of his thumb and index finger and rested his chin on his hand. Then he looked back up and, a sparkle of mischief twinkling in his eyes, declared, "We're gonna steal Toony's sail and put it on the roof of the East Wing, and then we're gonna lure the Dragos away and dig a giant crater to trick Lucas into thinking that a meteor killed them all, and then we'll make it just in time to replace all of Peach's flowers with Fooly Flowers, Bomb Flowers, and Demonic Petunias!"

"You always know what to do," Yoshi grinned as he picked himself up from the beanbag.

"You don't have to tell me what I already know, you dumb dinosaur," Ness retorted in feigned haughtiness as he, too, scrambled up in anticipation for the start of the day.

"Don't get too cocky, or I'll get your dorky little toy to beat the living crap out of you," Yoshi riposted with a mocking gesture over his shoulder.

In their eagerness to leave the room for another day of mischief, neither looked behind to see the 180 degree turn of the monkey's head, its unblinking eyes trained on the back of the retreating dinosaur.


	2. Hello, Dolly! 2

The door to Yoshi's room slammed open, revealing in its entrance Yoshi himself. He looked dead tired, the burden of exhaustion exerting its weight through the sag of his eyelids, the hunch of his back. Yet there was no denying the expression of triumph that bestowed on his worn face a lingering smile, a chest still distended with the bursting success of a day well-spent. From his right arm he brushed off several petals of pink and white; from his left shoe he deposited a layer of grime on the floor. In four woozy steps he was at the side of his large, circular dirt bed – and then he was gone, allowing gravity to collapse his eyelids and rest him on his belly. A bubble of snot issued from his left nostril, inflating and deflating according to the rise and fall of his chest, the rate of which gradually declined as the seconds grew into minutes.

For the first hour of the night, Yoshi slept soundly, serene smile still imparting curvature on his mouth.

* * *

When he awoke, it was due to a harsh beam of light that penetrated the flaps of his eyes to constrict the pupils within.

Yoshi groaned and threw his arm over his eyes, but it was too late – the sleep was gone, he was awake. With his other hand he groped the flesh of his belly. It rumbled in contentment, the acid teeth of his stomach still happily munching the ample supper he had stuffed himself with – well, it couldn't have been longer than an hour and thirty minutes, if he had to gauge based on how full he was feeling.

So if morning was still a good six to seven hours away, where the hell was that light coming from…?

"Wake up."

Yoshi shot up and made a good effort in opening his eyes, though he had to settle for a heavy squint and a couple of hapless blinks for a few seconds. As his pupils shrank accordingly and his corneas took over his retinas, the shapeless abstraction of color gradually took on a more concrete form, and with its increasing familiarity Yoshi's disbelief could only grow, taking palpable effects through the knitted confusion of his eyelids, the descent of the lower jaw to the general area of his chest – until finally the object shifted into complete focus, and Yoshi had no choice but to believe what he was seeing.

"You're up. About time," grumbled the Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, adjusting a dial on its chest so that the white light radiating from its entire body finally lowered in intensity – a gesture Yoshi would have appreciated before, when the incandescence had been needles to his eyes.

Anger and exasperation dispelled the confusion as Yoshi finally figured out what was going on, and in a sharp voice he called out, "Very funny, Ness. Why don't you come out and shove your stupid Monkeytron up your ass now?"

In a flash of movement the toy was on Yoshi's chest. The dinosaur let out a small shriek as he fell back on his hands, while the Monkeytron grabbed a fistful of the flesh around Yoshi's neck and shouted, "What did you say? Say it again! Call me 'stupid' one more time, I dare you! _Say it again_ , _say it again_ –"

Yoshi grabbed the monkey, wrenched him off his chest, and threw him across the room. It bounced twice off his bed and rolled across the floor, stopping just before it hit the wall with its eyes dead set on Yoshi's. He watched as the Monkeytron picked itself up, tilting its head left and right and testing the joints of its arms and legs with rhythmic swings and bends, before finally uttering, with a shaky voice and finger, "What. The. _Hell_. Are you?"

"Not very bright, are you?" the Monkeytron sneered as it began its slow, calculated approach back to Yoshi's dirt bed. "What Ness sees in such a 'dumb dinosaur' – his words – as yourself is beyond me. He's mentioned my name several times already, has he not?" The Monkeytron struck a noble pose with its arm bent towards it sides and its head turned to some faraway mysterious distance. "I am Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron!"

Though the fear and the panic had yet to release their vicious grip from his throbbing heart and wild mind, Yoshi still felt a drop of defiance dilute the emotions of distraught and incite within him the tiniest spark of anger. _Dumb dinosaur_?

"So – so, let me get this straight," Yoshi muttered as he rubbed his eyes with his hand, the pacing of his breathing slowly resetting back to normal. "You're alive."

"If by 'alive' you mean I can walk and talk and can think independent thoughts of my own, then yes, I am very much 'alive'," said the Monkeytron in its deep, gritty voice, that affirmed to Yoshi more and more of how impossible it would be for Ness to replicate.

"Okay," Yoshi said as he threw down his hand and peered at the action figure with a piercing stare of his own. " _How_?"

"I come from a game where crazed street signs and mad taxi cabs can think for themselves and make rational decisions based on their choices. Why do you question my sentience?"

"Fair point," Yoshi muttered in grudging reluctance, before quickly dropping it in favor of another attempt at sounding accusatory and in-the-right. "What the hell are you doing here? Shouldn't you be playing with Ness or something?"

The Monkeytron did not answer, but rather countered with a question of his own.

"Tell me, dumb dinosaur – are you jealous of me?"

"Of what, your cocksucking blowgun?" Yoshi smirked. He had been silly to react with such tremendous fear, even in the shock of the awakening, for the toy could not be taller than a mere six inches – a stomp away from being reduced to a mere heap of plastic and metal. In the light of his newfound confidence, Yoshi spat with vehemence uncharacteristic of his usual, happy self, as though to redeem himself in front of the silent eyes that judged his bravery.

The Monkeytron's answer, however, proved as perplexing as ever.

"No. I speak of my friendship with Ness. Surely you covet it, surely you desire such strong, brotherly bond that could never exist between he and your sad, pathetic self?"

Yoshi could only stare, he was so surprised.

"You're – you're kidding me, right? You're not being serious?" he finally spoke up, barely holding back a giggle.

"I assure you, I have never been more serious in my life."

"Right…" Yoshi wiped away a smile with a brush of his hand, cleared his throat, and tried his best to speak as forward as possible. "Listen, I don't know how to put this nicely, so I won't. Ness and I are _best buds_. We've been best buds since the end of 64, and we'll be best buds forever and ever – and no one, especially not some cheap, poorly-designed, delusional chunk of plastic who somehow believes it's the greatest cyborg of this universe –" Yoshi buried his mouth in his hand and burst into a brief explosion of laughter "– is going to take that away from us." Yoshi concluded his speech with a smirk and a rap of his knuckles against the monkey's head, prompting the toy to duck and swerve away. "So, long story short, no, I am not jealous of whatever illusory friendship you believe you have with Ness. Does that answer your question? Yes? Can I go back to sleep now, please?"

And with that, Yoshi turned away with his arms crossing his chest, flushed with the triumph of a swift, decisive victory with which he was sure had crushed any hopes of a retaliation from the losing side.

"Such confidence," murmured the voice behind him.

Yoshi turned, the triumph quickly ebbing to be replaced by – fury, frustration, impatience. It was the tone behind the words that set him off, a tone of condescending amusement that quite clearly hinted the certainty with which it blindly and incorrigibly swept aside Yoshi's flawless argument. Yoshi met the cold, unblinking stare with a fiery glare of his own, struggling between the choices of continuing the debate or dismiss it entirely when he next opened his mouth. He made his decision, and was about to voice the latter, when there came the infuriatingly well-timed interruption of the monkey, this time put in the form of a challenge.

"Well, then. If you are truly confident that Ness will prefer you over me as his best friend, then you surely wouldn't mind a little game? A challenge, if you will, that will once and for all confirm which of us two Ness holds dearer and closer to his heart?"

Again Yoshi's only response for the first few seconds was that of silence: Lower jaw stretched open in disbelief, the lids of his eyes cutting them in shapes that communicated the confusion with which he regarded Monkeytron's words.

"Okay, okay. Fine. Whatever you want," Yoshi finally huffed, throwing up his arms in mock defeat. "We'll have your dumb challenge come morning, so for now, I'd really just appreciate it if you could leave me alone and let me catch some Z's, alright?"

The words possessed a note of finality that left no stronghold for another argument, and to bolster the end of the conversation Yoshi made to stand up and open the door.

"Excellent," Monkeytron whispered, stepping closer just as Yoshi was about to unbend his knees. "Then, let the game begin – _now_."

And before he knew it, before he could even move a single molecule of his body – the Monkeytron launched itself straight at his chest. Another flash of movement, and Yoshi was on his knees, his eyes as round as saucer plates as he gazed down, silent and still from the shock, at his chest – the right side of his chest, to be exact, the flesh of which was currently impaled by the razor sword of Monkeytron's tail.

"Haaa…" Yoshi breathed, struggling at even just that – breathing, to fill his lungs with air and expel it at the slow, long drag he desired. There was no pain, no agony – but there was some kind of heavy stupor that had started with his head and now, quickly spread to his arms and legs, so that he was quite incapable of throwing off the attacker as he rightfully would have. In a slow, heavy drawl, he exhaled, "What… Are you… Doing…?"

"I am injecting your heart with a serum that will bind to your blood, bones, fats, and muscles and turn them into cotton stuffing," replied the Monkeytron – cold, quick, indifferent, as though a seasoned doctor detailing the procedures with which he would operate on his anxious patient. "Your skin, too, will change, and your exterior casing will soon become that of felt textile – very good material for dolls, trust me, for it moulds, stretches, and fits any shape you need much easier than other fabric textiles."

Though his physical response was slow, Yoshi's brain had no trouble understanding the words uttering from the insane monkey's mouth. Two and a fraction of a seconds' delay later, Yoshi rumbled with a muffled quality of a voice, "Whaa-aa-aat?"

"I suppose I should apologize. I neglected to mention that this challenge which you so confidently accepted will be played on my grounds. The grounds of a toy, that is." With a smile that seemed far more evil and conniving than that frequently worn by its real-life brethren, the Monkeytron finally pulled its lance-like tail free from Yoshi's chest, somehow not even leaving the tiniest hole in its exit. "At any rate, it's too late to go back on the challenge now. Your metamorphosis into a doll should begin quite soon – look, it has even begun now, look at you!" screamed the Monkeytron with ecstatic exuberance as it pulled back its tail (the tip of which momentarily dripped with some purple liquid before it sheathed it) and pointed fanatically to various parts of Yoshi's body. "Look at you, you're changing! You're _changing_!"

And changing he was, as Yoshi's physical entirety throbbed with tuft-shaped bulges, from the length of his arm to the girth of his belly. Yoshi swelled and swelled, every single part of his body becoming bloated with the abundance of fluff. His hands became mitten-like in shape and function, losing the gaps between that defined his fingers. His shoes, somehow, turned soft and plushy and surrendered its leathery consistency to match the felt that was consuming his entire body. Pretty soon he lost his balance and fell on his rear, the fats of his rump only existing now as a collection of cotton. Perhaps in overwhelming surprise of watching his own existence suffer the impossible transformation from organic to inorganic, Yoshi's eyes bulged like great hemispheres from their sockets. Then they bulged out again, thrusting out further this time. And they bulged out a third and final time, until with a loud, moist _squelch!_ his eyes popped from his sockets, completely displaced from their rightful places in his head by a flood of white cotton now frothing in copious amounts from his eyeholes.

"That reminds me," said the Monkeytron as it kicked the eyeballs to the direction of their owner. It clicked a switch on its left arm, revealing a sleek, cobalt-blue barrel of a gun, which fired, on his mental command, a beam of light that completely engulfed Yoshi and his eyes in an emanating sheen of blue. Within seconds the Inky Dinky Shrink Ray proved as reliable as ever, the top of Yoshi's plushy head no longer even peaking over the Monkeytron's.

At this point, Yoshi's transformation into a doll was more or less done – swollen, immobile, hot and stuffy, Yoshi tried desperately to move his body, swing his legs, wriggle his hands – _any_ thing, but the only part of him that moved was his tongue, swaying in the displaced air of Monkeytron's movement, soft, woolen, sticking out slightly from a mouth overflowing with cotton and just begging to be pulled. The monkey, however, ignored the invitation, and proceeded to click the switch on his right arm. The Vacuum Gun roared its voracious appetite to consume, rearing its ugly head from the confines of the Monkeytron's fist and consuming the stray eyeballs on the bed. Blind and paralyzed, Yoshi could only scream within his own dark hell as he first felt the tube brutally ram into his left eye socket and suck up the gray matter that remained inside his cottony skull. He was afforded no break when the Vacuum Gun was finally pulled from his cranium, for less than second later the same procedure was repeated with his mouth, and Yoshi felt his chest and belly deflate from the loss of the mass that had not turned to cotton.

"I used the chemicals in your intestines to turn all your internal organs into eggs," boomed the Monkeytron's voice in the coffin of darkness a minute after the vacuuming was finally over. "You will be needing them to live again when you turn back to normal. _If_ you turn back to normal." There was an unpleasant cackle, and before a single thought of protest could burgeon in the wild planes of his consciousness, Yoshi felt the exterior of his stomach being ripped open. "This egg contains your brain, your eyes, your lungs, and your entire nervous system," continued the voice, and Yoshi felt a familiar sphere nestle its way through the cotton of his belly. " _This_ egg contains your heart, your liver, your pancreas, and kidneys." Another uncomfortable insertion into his makeshift womb. "And this egg, finally, contains your entire digestive system, from your teeth to your two stomachs to the heap of your intestines." A final push, and then Yoshi felt a few tight pats sealing back the pouch of his stomach.

It was the final straw, the last strain his mind – wherever his mind was now – could withhold before crumbling into the dust of the unconscious earth. As Yoshi, finally, surrendered to the slumber enticed by the deepest, most darkest hell anyone could possibly be made to live, he heard – the words becoming increasingly fainter, more incoherent in its meaning – "Now all that's left to do is to sew buttons into your eyes, and we're ready to get this game started, once and for all. 'Best buds forever', you say? I suppose… We'll see about that, won't we? Yes we will. Yes, we will."


	3. Hello, Dolly! 3

Wednesday afternoon, and still Ness was sprawled on his bed. He snored lightly, a gentle dribble of drool oozing from the left corner of his mouth and staining a generous puddle into his pillow. A persistent itch broke through the anesthesia of his dreams, and Ness lifted a flap of his blue-and-white striped pajamas from his stomach and scratched away at the skin until it was red and hot.

Outside, the wild breeze of an afternoon rain blew small droplets through his open window and showered Ness's face with a gentle spray of cold and wet. He winced, frowned, turned over and muttered, "Five more minutes, Yoshi. Five more minutes, dammit…"

A particularly cold and heavy droplet splashed itself on the tip of Ness's nose. The reaction was immediate. Ness threw the covers off his legs, shot up from his bed, wrenched open his eyes, and yelled, "It's back throw time, mother –!"

There was no one there.

"…Huh," Ness finished lamely as he blinked twice and rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn't seeing things – and by that he meant seeing nothing. He scratched his head through the mess of his disheveled hair while wiping the traces of water with the sleeve of his left arm. A low, rumbling clap of thunder alerted him to the source of his awakening, and Ness jumped off his bed, strode over to the windows, and slammed it shut.

Along the way, Ness's eyes caught sight of the time on his Dali's Clock.

"Holy fishsticks!" Ness cried as he scrambled to the drawer above which the clock hung to ensure that the cloudiness of sleep was not altering his vision. There was no mistaking it – it was two in the afternoon, a whopping six hours past the regular time at which he was normally forced to wake up. More than half the day gone by and here he still was in his room, still clad in his pajamas, still without a meal in the comforts of his belly.

Which could only mean one thing.

Yoshi had not come to wake him up.

He had mixed feelings on that, as he opened the door to his closets and dug through for his attire of the day. Having never been a morning person, Ness's greatest guilty pleasure even before the days of _Smash_ was to ignore the shrill rings of his alarm clock (and later, the enraged screams of his mother downstairs) and sleep in, nestling his head deeper into his pillow or throwing his blanket over his head to block out the daylight. No longer was this the case, however, once he became good friends with Yoshi towards the start of _Melee_. The dinosaur would barge into his room and employ a rich variety of methods to wake up the stubborn youngster – be that drenching him in tropical juice, or borrowing a wave of Pikmin army to attack his head, or repeatedly throwing a Mr. Saturn and bouncing it against all parts of Ness's body until finally with a murderous roar Ness would grab Yoshi and back throw him out of his room – at which point the expenditure of energy would ensure his departure from his mattress and prevent him from falling back into the clasps of sleep.

Still though, there was no denying the advantage of waking early, Ness thought as he pulled on his blue-and-cyan bubble shirt designed to resemble Master Belch, complete with a pair of evil red eyes. Ness had forgotten the simple pleasures of a steaming hot delicious wholesome breakfast – scarfing down crispy bacons and eggs over easy, fluffy pancakes drowned in saccharine floods of heavenly maple syrup, hot crunchy brown toast smeared with sticky dollops of peanut butter (he preferred them chunky and without the jelly, thank you very much). As Yoshi himself put it, "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so dig in!" Followed quickly by a "Oh, and lunch is just as important, too." And, barely half a second later, "And dinner. And supper. And those little snacks you have in between your meals. Oh, and don't forget –"

"Shut the fuck up, Yoshi," Ness smiled to himself as he pulled on a pair of red shorts. Other than the joys of breakfast, so too was there the prospect of an entire morning of adventures that would have been nigh impossible had Yoshi not intruded his sleep. The early awakening came with it a six-hour gain in playing and Smashing and fooling about, be that playing baseball or pulling another one of their insufferable pranks on the too-easily-annoyed adults.

And so it was more than a little surprising that the long-lasting tradition had finally been broken on this apparently fateful day. Ness wracked his mind for some explanation, some mental reminder that Yoshi had surely alerted him if he really was to be out of town for whatever reasons today – but could find none. Shaking his head as he put on an azure blue cap, Ness could only assume that the reason for his absence was linked to some sudden business that had befallen him before he could wake him up.

Ness closed the closet door, and was promptly presented with the second surprise of the day: His Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, sitting comfortably atop a box by the door, joined by some new, plushy doll he had never before seen in his life, and yet of a design whose immediate familiarity struck with Ness instantly.

He walked forward, grabbed the new toy, and held it up to his face. Sure enough, it was exactly what he had expected it to be: A Yoshi doll, soft and huggable in all its plushy glory. It was remarkable, and even somewhat eerie, how similar its appearance was to the actual, living species. Proportions had always been a tricky aspect to nail for the craftsmen, from professional toymakers to talented fans, whenever they took a stab at remodeling any one of the Smashers into their own personal artistic creation – but this one seemed to get every little detail right, from the ratio of the length and width of its arms to the exact scale of its belly relative to its size. Ness turned the doll around and around in the hopes of finding some imperfection, some jarring quality that would immediately deter his mind from the strengthening association he was making with this doll and his missing friend – but he found none. The only prodigious difference was the blue button eyes stitched into the doll's sockets, but this only bolstered the unsettling dissonance with which Ness currently conjured Yoshi's image. What _would_ a real-life Yoshi look like with buttons for eyes?

Ness suddenly had a vision of a giant metallic hand working needle and thread into Yoshi's eyeholes.

"Black is traditional…"

He shuddered and dropped his eyes from the buttons, instead focusing his gaze on the small, thin, red flap of a tongue that curved out from the doll's mouth. Curious, Ness wrapped his palm around the velvety material and gave it a quick, hard pull – revealing a hidden rope unraveling from the depths of the doll's mouth, until Ness's hand met tension and the tongue, having made its way to the Yoshi doll's legs, refused to be yanked any further. He let go, and as the ribbon of red slowly snaked back into its owner's mouth, a muffled, electronic voice suddenly burst from within the doll's belly.

 _Ness?! It's me, Yoshi! Can – can you hear me? Listen, you need to –_

The voice faded away as the tongue resumed its original length and position from the mouth.

"Ha! It knows my name," Ness grinned, which all but confirmed the rising suspicion that who had suddenly gifted him this doll and who was responsible for waking him up were but the same. He pulled, again, and brought his ear closer to the doll's belly this time.

 _Just – just answer the question! I'm your best friend, right? No one else but –_

Again the voice faded away, and this time Ness just smirked and shook his head. "You don't need to feel _that_ bad about not making it today, you dumb dinosaur."

Another pull.

 _No, listen, I'm not –! Just answer the question! And don't stop pull –_

"Booo~ooorring," Ness yawned as he threw the Yoshi doll behind him. Its head bounced off the wall and landed on Ness's bed with its nose turned to the ceiling.

Not even casting a second glance behind him, Ness tenderly picked up the Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron from the box and peered at the label that it and the Yoshi doll had been partially concealing.

DONATION BOX FOR ALL YOUR TЯASH TOYS LMAO

"Odd," Ness muttered, closing the box after opening it to check whether anything was in there (there wasn't). His mind worked furiously as he turned back to the Yoshi doll on his bed, staring mindlessly at the ceiling with its cold button eyes. The only Smasher who knew the code to his room was Yoshi, which meant that the only Smasher who could have brought in the doll and the donation box would also be Yoshi. But then why had he not woken him up? Had he been so stripped of time that neatly placing the donation box by the door and sitting the two toys atop it was all he could manage? Not to mention the amount of time wasted in going down to the Atrium, picking up his box, and bringing it back to his room…

He rubbed the back of his head. The most rational explanation he could think up of was that some emergency had transpired that required Yoshi to wake up at some ungodly hour – much too early to wake him up. The dinosaur's general disposition to kindness would explain his effort in lugging the box up to Ness's room before he took his leave, a gesture which evoked a small feeling of warmth in Ness's heart.

"Well," Ness concluded his musings as he scratched his chin, "if Yoshi can't make it today…"

Without warning, he launched himself onto the bed, the impact of his landing bouncing the doll into the air. He caught it with his left hand, and shoved it close to the Monkeytron's face.

"Oh no!" Ness cried in a ridiculously exaggerated girly-girl voice. "It's the Evil Alien Dinosaurs from Venus, and they're pulling all the hair out of my ponytail! Somebody help me!" Then, shaking the Monkeytron slightly as his voice took a much deeper, more manlier tone: "I'll save you!" He pushed the Monkeytron's fist so that it aimed straight for the Yoshi doll, and then swooped him down to deliver a gut-wrenching punch.

"BOOOOOOOMMM!" A supernova of white and flames exploded from the collision point between fist and belly, and the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus flew one thousand miles away from the impact zone, crashing through buildings and reducing cities into mere chunks of rubble and concrete. Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron activated his jet boots and blasted his way through the mushroom clouds of dust and hazy rings of smoke, necessary destruction for the eradication of all that stood in the way of justice. He made the journey of a thousand miles in a single second, and found the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus picking itself up in the center of a circle of leveled mountains. It screamed a earsplitting roar that would have caused even the hair on the bravest man to stand up on end – but Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron was no man. He was _Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron_.

"You can't defeat me!" screamed the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus as it pointed at Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron with one bloodstained nail from its three-fingered claw. "My power level is _over nine thousand_!"

"Oh yeah?" said Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron in the most manliest and valiant voice you can ever think of as he unsheathed the Super Zaiyan Sword of Unlimited Justice from his tail. "Well, _my_ power level is _over nine thousand and one_!"

"Eat this, neeeeeerrrrrrrddddddd!" the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus spat as it picked up a giant slipper-shaped boulder and flung it straight to Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron's face. Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron calmly lifted up his left arm, thrust forth the barrel of his Shrink Forblicator Gzornagun 8000, and fired an alternating sine-and-cosine wave of radiant blue that shrunk the boulder to the size of a pebble. Then he unholstered the Supreme Vacuum Gun of Undying Good (which sported an epic backstory that took up an entire arc of Season 8 and involved the lore of Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron's creation and his complicated relationship with Dr. Scientist Peenees) and unleashed a mega-sized air tunnel that seemed a bit overkill for the mere purpose of sucking up the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus's now-dinky projectile. Then he brought the cannons of his arms together, used his cyborg brain to reverse-engineer the guns, and combine their powerful beams to blast the slipper-shaped boulder back to the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus at a size _even bigger than when the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus had first launched it_.

Needless to say, all this took about a cool four seconds and did not take nearly as long as it took for you to read that ponderous paragraph.

"You fight well, _monkey_!" shrieked the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus with condescending delight as it smashed the rock into bits with a swipe of its spiked tail. "But too bad for you! This isn't even my final form!"

"Oh yeah?" grunted Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron as a green blaze of energy began to consume the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus's _entire fricken body_. "Well, _this_ isn't even _my_ final form!"

"Krrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!" screeched the Evil Alien Dinosaur from Venus through gritted fangs as it became a mere silhouette in the brutal incandescence of pure uncontainable energy roaring in climbing flames from its body.

"Hrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!" yelled Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron as he, too, became engulfed in a brilliance of blistering red that marked _his_ pure uncontainable energy.

"KRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

"HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

"KRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

"HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

"…And then they'll carry on screaming for the next ten minutes to end the episode," Ness finished as he laid down the toys among a mess of slippers, blankets, and the looping string of his yo-yo. "Will Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron prove victorious in his hardest fight yet against those despicable Evil Alien Dinosaurs from Venus?! Or will he fall to his knees and send the world into eternal darkness under the rule of these tyrannical leaders who have not a single shred of goodness in their hearts?!" Ness, now, turns to the plane of your computer screen, gives you a small little wink, and continues, "Find out in the next episode – I mean, chapter, of Super Duper Ult – I mean, **Hello, Dolly**!"


	4. Hello, Dolly! 4

The first line of the next chapter, and already Ness is breaking his promise, that little shit. Instead of continuing the screaming and the realization of his toys' final forms, Ness put them back down and gazed with some wistful emptiness at the ceiling, in a still trance that lasted as long as one or two minutes.

Then he shook his head and picked up the Monkeytron.

"Y'know, since Yoshi isn't here today," he said, "how about you come along with me today?"

He shook the Monkeytron's head with a wag of his finger.

"Alrighty then, let's go!" Ness jumped up, slinging a bag over his shoulder and zipping open its top compartment in order to nestle Monkeytron snugly inside. In his rush to get up and finally get the day started, the sole of his right shoe just barely displaced the Yoshi doll's balance. It fell over. Ness looked down to see the doll leaning against his leg, as though in quiet plea to accompany him on his grand undertakings.

Ness hesitated only for a second, before scooping up the Yoshi doll and stuffing him into the uneven spaces he had left in his bag.

"Guess you're the next best thing to the real Yoshi," he muttered to himself as he sealed the bag again. Then he adjusted his cap so that a malicious shadow cast over his eyes, further exemplifying the manic gleams that shone in each of Ness's pupils.

"Look out world, here I come!" he shouted as he pulled open his door and bounded through the corridors. As we watch his boyish back retreat further and further into the depths of a hallway, a catchy tune in 4/4 time signature reminiscent of 60's pop rock plays out of nowhere, in perfect harmony with the set of lyrics about to follow. As the detail they encompass will vary largely in setting, please be reminded that the events taking place are happening in rapid montage, cherry-picked to feature select scenes capturing a day in the life of the Smash Mansion's resident prankster. In addition, each line of the song shares the same recurring imagery – of Ness smiling and laughing and just having a blast with his Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, while largely neglecting, and even mistreating, his Yoshi doll. As an example: The first line of this song sings of Ness playing baseball with his best friend. Perhaps Ness swings his bat at a baseball thrown by Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, only to accidentally smack the Yoshi doll dressed as an umpire behind him. Who knows?! Take a wild ride with your imagination, dear reader, and sing along!

 _Play some baseball with your best friend  
Read comic books with your best friend  
Throw stones at cars with your best friend  
Fix old submarines with your best friend  
Rise and shine, have a ball of a time, with your best frrriii~eeennnddd!_

 _Steal Ike's Ragnell with your best friend  
Sell it online with your best friend  
Blame it on Ryu with your best friend  
Watch grown men fight with your best friend  
It never gets old, making memories of gold, with your best frrriii~eeennnddd!_

 _Wear a Redead suit with your best friend  
Scare Peach witless with your best friend  
Realize she was making a sewing tutorial video to put up on SmashTube and she's totally pissed at you and your best friend  
Run away because she's gonna kill you and your best friend  
Watch her scream and shout, a little something about –_

"I'm going to kill you Ness!" she screamed, bringing the music to a screeching halt as she threw golf clubs, frying pans, tennis rackets, and hapless Toads at the fleeing, madly-cackling youngster who was still trying to pull one leg out of his Redead suit. "You and your little…"

Her voice trailed off to nothingness as Ness rounded the corner, but it mattered not as the voice finally resumed:

 _Your best, oh yes, your absolute best, best frrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnndddddddddddd!_

* * *

The door to Ness's door slammed open, revealing in its entrance Ness himself. His face shone of triumph, and he further communicated this in its verbal form as he zipped Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron out of his bag and breathed, "Boy, what a great day, huh pal? That was fun, wasn't it?" To which Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron had no reply, but there was no need for one – Ness simply twisted Monkeytron's arm into a salute stance, adopted another one of his deep, valiant voices, and rumbled, "It was my honor, Commander Ness, to accompany you on your heroic adventures to maintain law and order in this world."

"Ah, stop having such a pole up your ass and go treat yourself a drink or something," Ness smirked as he finished his play and carefully rested Monkeytron alongside his Starman. He was just about to close his bag when a stroke of green caught his eye.

"Oh, right. You." Ness lifted the Yoshi doll out of his bag. The fresh quality of its newness was gone, and now it was black and muddied in various places, the consequence of rough play not fit for its physique. Once again, Ness hesitated, staring into the blank button eyes as its head flopped onto his left wrist. Then, holding it up with his right hand, Ness pulled the tongue and listened closely to what it had to say.

 _Yoshi! No –_ Ness _– Wow! Losing – mind – please – Yoshi!_

"Broken," Ness muttered to himself as the voice was once again silenced by the return of tongue into mouth. Ness stood still, pondering many thoughts for a solid ten seconds – but one stood out the clearest among the chaos of its brethren, and Ness, after firmly nodding his head in affirmed resolution of his decision, walked over to the donation box and dropped the doll inside.

"See ya tomorrow, Yoshi," Ness muttered as he crawled into bed.


	5. Hello, Dolly! 5

Friday morning, and still Ness was sprawled on his bed. He was not sleeping, however. A squint at the clock had told him he had awoken a good ten minutes before the time at which Yoshi would barge through his door. He did not get up, but remained in bed, keeping his eyes shut and opening them only to steal occasional glances at the clock. Seven fifty-five, only five minutes left… Three more minutes… Two… One…

Eight a.m. Ness's eyes darted to the door before he hastily shut them again.

Silence, for ten more seconds.

"Oh come on," Ness said loudly and impatiently as he threw off his blanket and launched himself off the bed. In four quick strides he was at his door, and a thrust of his head out into the hallways told him Yoshi was nowhere to be seen.

Ness retreated into his room, slammed the door shut, and leaned against it with arms crossed over his chest and head bowed in pouting anger.

"Where the hell is he?" Ness growled out loud to himself. He was, all at once, furious, concerned, annoyed. He bit the knuckle of his index finger, scrunched his brow in exasperated impatience, darted his eyes back and forth to the face of the clock. "It's been four flippin' days!"

Ness threw himself on his bed and groaned. It was definitely the longest the dinosaur had gone without any notice of his absence – any past trip or event that would take Yoshi away from Ness's presence would at least involve Yoshi telling Ness about his disappearance. The first day, Monday, had been no problem; Tuesday was a little worrying but bearable enough. Wednesday was when Ness had trouble reassuring himself that he was going to call him, any second now. On Thursday, Ness was angry. He asked Smashers whether they had seen Yoshi and snapped back when they replied with a negative. He took out his baseball bat and smashed a framed picture of he and Yoshi (only to spend the next two hours taping the frame back and supergluing the shards of glass together). When he consulted the Leave Book and noticed that Yoshi's name was nowhere to be written in any of the recent pages, he slammed the book shut and sent it telepathically flying within the mansion until it hit someone, who just so happened to be Ryu, who just so happened to contemptuously walk past Ike.

And now, on Friday, Ness felt... He swallowed. He felt depressed. He felt actual sadness. He felt as though he was homesick, as though a lump of painful nostalgia and desire was feeding off all the sadness in his mind. Whenever he felt these raw negative emotions bear down upon him, a quick call to his mother would be all it took to drive the feeling away and restore him back to his cheery, mischievous self.

But this wasn't his mother. This was Yoshi, and at the moment the dinosaur might as well have been a literal dinosaur for all the means he was contactable, which was to say he wasn't contactable at all.

It was almost like Yoshi just didn't want to see him anymore…

Ness snapped his eyes open and shot up. Well, _he_ didn't care. He didn't care whether Yoshi didn't want to see him anymore, or have anything to do with him. The fact of the matter was that _he_ wanted to see Yoshi, right now, this instant, whether Yoshi wanted to or not.

Ness jumped off the bed and got into his outside wear. He was going to scrub the mansion clean with his all-seeing eyes, that's what he was going to do. No nook or cranny would go unsearched, no Geodude and Rock Mushroom left unturned. Yoshi had not signed in the Leave Book, which was necessary for him to do if he wanted to leave the mansion for an extended period of time. That meant he was still somewhere in here. Of course, there was always the possibility that he had simply not signed in it before taking his leave – there was no Master Hand around to enforce that rule, after all. But something told Ness that he was still inside this mansion, somewhere. The Smash Mansion was a big place, after all – plenty of places to hide in without anyone realizing for days. It would be a very un-Yoshilike thing to do, of course. But at the same time, so was disappearing without a word or a trace…

Nestling his cap on his head in determination, Ness wrenched the knob of his door and set out for the grand undertaking of saving private Yoshi.

* * *

"Yoshi?" Ness called out tentatively as he opened the door to Yoshi's empty, dark room. It smelled unused and dusty.

"Yoshi?" Ness yelled with his hands cupped over his mouth as he walked the first floor corridors of residence.

"Yoshi?" Ness again called as he poked his head through the bushes of the Courtyard.

"Yoshi?" Ness repeated as he opened the cupboards of the Kitchen.

"Yoshi?" Ness spoke with absolute disregard of his surroundings as he poked his head out of the showerhead of Samus's bathroom, earning him a scream and tight wet towel slap over his eyes.

"Yoshi?" echoed Ness's voice inside the pod of a Deku-Baba as he stretched open its carnivorous jaws to peer inside.

"Yoshi?" Ness said aloud as he sat in the cinemas watching Yoshi's Island: The Movie 3, which caused several other of his fellow moviegoers to lean forward in his general direction and furiously shush, " _Sssshhh_!"

"Yoshi?" Ness whispered in the exact same cinema.

"Yoshi?" Ness said effortlessly despite having to worm his head through the ball of punches and kicks and bites that were Ike's and Ryu's bodies.

"Yo, Shi!" Ness greeted cheerfully the resident boring Mii who lived quite close to the Smash Mansion; Shi simply responded with a wave of his hand. Ness continued to smile as he watched Shi walk away, before suddenly adopting a deathly expression and murmuring, "Man, I hate that bastard."

"Yoshi?" Ness was shouting as he walked into a generic, harmless-looking white room –

"You!" a voice thundered from inside.

Ness's head snapped to the direction of the noise, and felt a groan escape him upon seeing who it was.

"Oh! Uh. Hi, Peach! Uh… Lovely day, isn't –"

" _If you think you can come in here and ruin my sewing tutorial videos like you did with my flower arrangement one –_ "

It was only then that Ness saw the spools of thread, the array of needles, and the lengths of fabric currently stacked before Peach and the Camera Toad.

"I didn't mean to –"

Peach would hear none of it. Out from her dress popped a frying pan, and mad chase throughout the mansion ensued – all just a day in the life of the Smash Mansion's regular prankster.

* * *

The door to Ness's room slammed open, revealing in its entrance Ness himself. He looked dead tired, the burden of exhaustion exerting its weight through the sag of his eyelids, the hunch of his back. There was absolutely no expression of triumph upon the worn face. The day had been a failure, simply put. He had not seen Yoshi, hadn't even heard of him from all the other Smashers, and all he had was a frying pan-shaped bruise on his back to show for it.

The clocked ticked eleven, and Ness looked down at the donation box by his feet. In exactly fifty-nine minutes he would have to have the box ready by the designated corner in the Atrium. The box that had mysteriously found its way into his room just four days prior. Previously he thought it was a gesture of kindness by the dinosaur. Now, he wasn't so sure.

He opened it again and took out the doll that was almost an exact spitting image of his best friend. Its head flopped over Ness's left hand for support, its cold, black button eyes staring lifelessly into Ness's chest. The strip of red velvet that dangled from its mouth incited just one more pull, and after a second of hesitance, that was exactly what Ness did.

 _Nnnnshiiiiii! Yoshi!_

Another second, another pull.

 _Yoshi! Yonnnnsshii~_

'One more time,' Ness thought dully to himself.

 _Nnn… Nnn… Nnnn…_

Come to think of it, he had never seen this doll before, not even once in his several visits to Yoshi's room. Not that he had avidly looked through ever corner to actively sought out a doll in his friend's likeness, but… Well, wasn't it odd of Yoshi to not even mention it, at least once? A doll, in his likeness, that knew to talk and construct sentences using the names of those who held it. What story could it have for Yoshi to keep it a secret for so long?

And why now? Why, of all the time they had been together – why, when he was ready to just up and disappear, did he finally decide to reveal the doll to him, without a single note or word of explanation? Was it some kind of farewell gift, a felt substitute for his missing presence? Or was there something that he just wasn't getting here?

The clock ticked eleven-ten. He would have to make his decision soon.

"Can I be sappy, just for one minute?" Ness asked aloud.

There was, of course, no response, but Ness looked around in silly paranoia, as though to reaffirm that there really was no one to see his soft, what he deemed "weak" side that he so expertly covered up with the bold, brash nature of a young teenage boy. The only response he got was the unbroken stare of Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, who sat on his desk and gazed eerily into where Ness's heart would be.

Ness took a deep breath, and continued. "Listen, bud. I don't know where you are. I don't even know why you're gone. I wish you could have at least told me something before you just… Vanished like that, you know? It's a shit thing to do, and it's making me feel like shit. And making me feel like shit isn't the Yoshi I know and love." He squeezed the doll straight in its chest and belly, half out of resentment, half out of some strange fondness. "But if this is the best you could give me before you had to go, if this is the last thing I'll ever get from you to remember you by… Then buddy, there is no way I could ever just give you away like that. Ever."

And to prove it Ness concluded by crossing his arms over the doll's back and bringing it into a long, tight, warm embrace. It was quite comforting, if he had to be honest, feeling the plushy fur brush up against his skin and compress according to the will of his body, and in that moment Ness suddenly found himself wishing he had more dolls to play with when he was younger.

All of a sudden, out of the darkness, out of the silence –

" _Wrong_."


	6. Hello, Dolly! 6

A/N: PLEASE READ!

I normally don't do Author's Notes except in the cases of emergencies, and this is definitely one.

I had to repost the sixth chapter of Hello, Dolly! because I was messing around with fonts. Since traffic was low for a while, I figured I'd quickly post what I was experimenting, see if it caused any visible effects on my story, and, after reaffirming that the changes took place, delete them and return the story to normal.

Unfortunately, even after I was done with my experiment and reverted the doc back to its original, experiment-less state... THE CHANGES STILL REMAINED. And I know ff tells us to wait at least thirty minutes for visible changes to occur, but the perfectionist in me just got so angsty after ten minutes that I ended up deleting the chapter and re-uploading it.

Then I got an email saying that a new chapter of Hello, Dolly! has been uploaded, and I facepalmed.

I apologize, I really do. It wasn't my intention to re-post the same chapter and spark some false hope that I had uploaded a new one. And if there was any way I can take this story down from the front page that it currently is sitting at AGAIN without anything new, then I would do it in a heartbeat.

Sorry for the mishap, guys. It'll never happen again ^^;

As penance for my wrongdoing, I'll keep this Author's Note (and I absolutely DETEST including A/N's in my story, can't stand them because I feel they break away from the engagement of the plot) until this story is over.

* * *

Though the sight of Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron standing up on its own will and then pointing its finger squarely at his face could not have been clearer, Ness still had to rub his eyes and blink once or twice. It was true that he was used to the sights of inanimate objects, from ordinary cups of coffee to nondescript spheres of metal, attain some measure of sentience – but it was a different story altogether when it involved his long-lost, cherished childhood toy.

When at last Ness believed what he was seeing, he pointed his own finger straight at the toy and cried, "You're alive?!"

"If by 'alive' you mean I can –"

"But that makes no sense," Ness interrupted, not even looking at the Monkeytron as he began pacing back and forth with his chin resting on his hands. "All the objects that took on life should have returned to normal after we defeated Gigyas." He took one more step towards the right end of the room before looking back up and fixing Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron with a curious hard stare. "How are you still a… I mean, how are you still _here_?"

The plastic protrusions of Monkeytron's face that formed those stern, noble lips stretched into a slight smile. It was both out-of-place and perfectly comfortable upon the rest of its features. "Let us not concern ourselves with such trivial matters, Ness. Put that silly Yoshi doll back into the box, and answer me this. I, Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, am your best friend, am I not?"

One word broke through the walls of deep concentration Ness had trapped himself in, two syllables among the myriads of others that just so happened to possess the right blades to slide perfectly into the keyholes of Ness's ears.

"Yoshi!" Ness uttered to himself, smacking his forehead for forgetting what should be his top priority. "Look, Monkeytron," Ness said, suddenly adopting a business-like tone as he turned to face Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron again, "I know it's a stretch, but you haven't seen him around lately, have you? Yoshi, I mean?"

The smile flickered, but Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron maintained the face of contradiction as it replied, "Perhaps, Ness, you would like to answer the question I proposed earlier first?"

"What now?"

"I asked you to reaffirm the fact that I am your true best friend that you have ever had. A simple 'yes' will suffice."

There was a second's pause as Ness's jaw dropped slightly in response to Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron.

Then the second passed and out came Ness's answer, as quick and brutal as a Mad Taxi driven by an even madder driver. "Hell no."

The Monkeytron's smile faltered completely this time, turning a full hundred-and-eighty and affixing a frown upon its face.

"What did you say?" he spoke in a low, cold, deadly whisper.

"No. N. O. No!" Ness stressed the last syllable as he strode over to the Monkeytron and stuffed his face directly into the latter's. "Listen here, you _toy_. If you think something like you – a cheap, delusional chunk of plastic and metal designed to entertain the most childish of minds – can ever compete with the flesh and blood of my actual friends, then boy, do I have news for you!" Ness prodded the Monkeytron right in its cybernetic chest. "You're just a toy, you understand that? Nothing more, nothing less! Know your place in the world, and don't elevate yourself to anything but!" His message made clear, Ness stood back, his eyes still boring into that of the Monkeytron's, and spat out, his words and tone as vile as ever, "Now, unless you're going to help me look for my _best friend_ , I suggest you sit tight and not speak a word like the good little toy you're supposed to be."

The transformation in Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron's face was a phenomenon in itself. The awkward, yet genuine smile was nowhere to be seen now, replaced by a frown pressed violently into the molds of plastic. The glossy-brown eyebrows became angry slashes that only further communicated the rage spewing from those painted eyes. And yet, when he next spoke, it was in quiet, controlled voice that was perfectly in-character with how he was portrayed in his cartoons.

"Why do you feel this… _Best friend_ of yours necessitates such a long, arduous search?"

"What are you, stupid? Doesn't the fact that he's my _best_ –"

"What I mean is," the Monkeytron interrupted with random spazzes of his tail and arms as he twisted his head to face Ness again, "why do you feel such a long and arduous search is necessary when your best friend is right here, right now… In your very hands?"

It took quite the while for the words to hit him.

Ness, with eyes and jaws wide in disbelief, slowly turned his head to the Yoshi doll that he held in his hands. He stared at the stuffed head that forlornly slumped over its shoulder. The proportions and the features that were an exact spitting image of the real Yoshi. The dead button eyes, looking without seeing straight into his own.

In a rattling croak, Ness whispered, "Yo – Yoshi?"

There was no response, and so Ness wrapped his hand around the velvet rope and pulled.

 _Nnn… Nnn… Nnneesssss…_

Silence.

Ness's body shook as his breath rattled from his mouth.

"Change him back," Ness finally said, in a voice completely devoid of emotion.

"Ah, yes, I suppose I should do that," Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron muttered, taking, from seemingly out of nowhere, a tiny crystal that glowed with some green phosphorescence trapped within. "I did promise after all, didn't I? But you know –"

"I said," Ness interrupted, his voice ascending into a deadly snarl as he gently sat down Yoshi on his bed and whipped out his bat, " _change him back_."

"– I haven't given up yet," Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron finished without paying the slightest heed to Ness's words as it sucked the crystal back into its right arm cannon.

Then it lifted both the Shrink Forblicator Gzornagun 8000 and the Supreme Vacuum Gun of Undying Good high over its head, crossed them into an X-shape, and yelled, " _Extremely Epic But Gratuitously Named Supermassive Vortex of Simultaneous Rapid Accelerated Contraction!_ "

And Ness, despite the latest series of revelations, despite the sudden direness of the situation thrust into the light, could not help but drop his jaw even further as the words triggered a memory long hidden in the recesses of his mind.

"No way!" he cried out, half in shock, half in wonder. "You're really doing the Extremely Epic But Gratuitously Named Supermassive Vortex of Simultaneous Rapid Accelerated Contraction? The very same technique you used to defeat Dr. Scientist Peenees's 6969 Monster of Binary Insignificance from Season 4, Episode 10?"

"The very same," grinned Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron as it conjured a small circle of green smoke from the cannons of its arms.

"Super cool," Ness muttered in awe as he stared at the reenacting of one of the show's monumental moments happen in his very room – before snapping back to his senses with a quick jerk of his head. "I mean," Ness immediately corrected by raising his voice once more to its previous amplitude as he pointed his baseball bat at the toy with its arms crossed to the heavens, "stop your mumbo-jumbo at once and change. Yoshi. _Back_! Don't make me go over there and bash your head in!"

"Too late," Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron whispered with manic glee, and Ness realized, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, that it was right. The wispy circle of green had already evolved into an emerald spiral of heavy smoke, which billowed in copious amounts from either of the arm cannons and added to the ever-expanding circumference of the aerial whirlpool. Quicker and quicker the vortex span, wider and wider it spanned. A whistling draft rustled its presence in the room, comforting and breezy at first. Ness, however, knew not to underestimate the calm before the storm. He grabbed Yoshi and gently, carefully, pushed him into the biggest, most spacious compartment of his bag. As an afterthought he kept Yoshi's head out of the bag, zipping the compartment around his neck and sparing his friend from the stuffiness of a sealed environment.

In the few seconds it took for Ness to do this the gentle breeze had accelerated into a tumultuous mini-typhoon. Every article of fabric and cloth, from the sheets of his bed to the dry curtains of his window, rustled madly as it was pulled towards the raging eye of the tornado. The objects within the immediate vicinity of Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron's summoning were the first casualties, and the Starman figurine, the Pencil Eraser and the Eraser Eraser, a plate of half-finished Lucky Sandwich – the residents of Ness's desk were lifted into the air, sucked towards the gravity pool of the Monkeytron's surging creation, shrinking and shrinking as they spiraled further and further into the center of the vortex, until they became so small that they became, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

"Not in my room, dammit!" Ness yelled hotly, but he knew it all to be in vain. Already the chair and the desk itself were being slowly lifted into the air… The winds grew stronger and stronger, buffeting him towards the direction of the proportion-altering quicksand. Ness, with squinted eyes and arms over his face, began trudging towards his door. His cap blew off his head, and for one mad second Ness thrust out his arms in order to grab it – but it slipped from his grasp and was promptly sucked into the wasteland of disintegrating sizes. In that second Ness's body swayed dangerously, and, without warning, he was suddenly lifted off his feet, his body about to enter a state of free fall not limited to the vertical dimension.

"Play with me, Ness!" roared the Monkeytron in deranged laughter. " _Play with me_!"

Ness could not hear, he was yelling so loudly. He once again made a wild grab for something – anything. His left hand found the cold surface of his doorknob. The winds were howling all around him now. The framed picture of he and his dog King looking over the town of Onett flew past his ear, shrank to the size of an ant within a millisecond, and disappeared into the whirlpool another millisecond later. The smoky rings were close, dangerously close –

Ness twisted the knob in his hand. The door slammed open, but before it could squish Ness against the wall, he let go and used his right hand to grab the now-exposed doorframe. He flopped and flapped like a flag in a thunderstorm, his cold fingers nearly losing grip of the cracking, splintering wood.

Ness directed his left hand away from the wide-open doorframe, towards the vortex, and, mustering every ounce of his psychic powers from every corner of his brain, screamed, " _PK FIRE_!"

A hot jetblast of flames exploded from the palm of his left hand, and the sheer momentum of the psionic projectile was enough to bodily launch him out from the doorframe and free him from the vice grip of the tornado.

Ness performed two somersaults, blasting off towards the adjacent wall of the corridor. He was about to crash his bag, and hence, Yoshi, against the wall, but at the last second made a split aerial turn that made him smash his chest and face instead. As he slid down to the floor of the corridor, Ness, panting heavily and looking as though he could faint from exhaustion alone, looked into his room. It was fast becoming deleted from existence, the last of the door crumbling into splinters of wood.

He closed his eyes, inflated his lungs with oxygen. He had to get up. It wouldn't be long before the shrinking whirlpool would exert its power well outside the confines of his room. He had to get up, had to get up now and run, run away…

The violent _whoosh_ es of the manufactured meteorological disaster suddenly subsided, and Ness opened his eyes a peep.

The Extremely Epic But Gratuitously Named Supermassive Vortex of Simultaneous Rapid Accelerated Contraction was gone.

Which could only mean one thing.

Ness gulped.

He had to run away. _Now_. He couldn't fight. Not with Yoshi strapped to his back.

Ness pressed his palms against the floor, took one last huge breath, and pushed himself off.

Mere seconds after he moved from his spot, there was an earsplitting _WHAM!_ as several layers of wood and concrete were reduced to heaps of rubble and clouds of dust. The shockwave of the massive collision nearly whisked him off his feet, and Ness, after several bouts of violent coughs and rapid blinks, turned to see what had caused the sudden destruction.

There was his desk, as wooden and plain as ever – except now it was about the size of a bus. One end of it had brutally rammed into the wall that Ness had been sitting against seconds before. The other end was still stuck through the massive crater it had blasted in the wall of Ness's room.

And right atop this giant table was Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, the deranged smile of blocky plastic teeth still plastered upon its plaster face.

"Pl _la_ Aa **a** yy **Y** yy _w_ **i** iI **I** t _t_ tH ** _h_** _m_ Ee ** _e_** E **E** e, N **e** ** _e_** S _s_ s ** _S_** S!" it shrieked in a garbled voice that sounded as though it was screaming through a voice distorter. " ** _P_** **l** Ll **Aa** _a_ **a** aA **a** y ** _yy_** Y W **i** i _i_ tt **h** h **H** hh **_m_** E _ **e** e_ **e** Ee ** _e_** ee!" it shrieked again, even as Ness immediately turned tail and began running in the opposite direction of the psychopathic toy. It aimed its erect, throbbing Supreme Vacuum Gun of Undying Good straight at Ness's back, straight at Yoshi popping his head from the flap of Ness's bag, and moaned, in a chilly, detached monotone: **_Ppppppppllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy wwwwwwwwiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhh mmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee._**

* * *

"Hey Ness!" piped up Kirby in his cute, squeaky voice as he waved towards the youngster rushing forward from the far end of the corridor. "You're just in time for our Last Supper before Master Hand comes back next Event Match! Come in and –"

"Get the hell out of here, Kirby!" Ness bellowed as he ran past the entrance of the Dining Room.

"Wha –" Kirby stuttered, both surprised and hurt by the suddenness of the rejection.

And before he or anyone else in the Dining Room knew it, they were attacked by a tidal wave of humongous objects. Monsoons of massive mugs and marbles rained down upon their unprotected heads; collections of colossal coins and cards crushed them under their sheer weight; sprays of seismic-sized soaps and spoons spelled their doom to be trapped underneath heaps and hills of enormous objects for the unforeseeable future. Kirby screamed, Roy yelled, Fox hollered, Zelda shrieked – but, at least for the time being, it seemed the Smashers in the Dining Room really had had their Last Supper, after all.

* * *

"Falcon, could you please just get out of the way?" Samus groaned, barely able to keep her eyes open as she waited in exasperation for Falcon to budge from her door.

"How about a goodnight kiss first?" Douglas Jay Falcon said playfully before winking to the plane of your computer screen, clearly convinced that his latest plan in making out with Samus was totally going to work.

"How about a goodnight punch?" Samus snapped back, flying her eyelids right open and reeling back a fist ready to devastate the finer features of Falcon's face.

At that moment, Ness and Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron ran right past them. There was a loud _whoosh_ as the Supreme Vacuum Gun of Undying Justice looked for new things to consume, and when the dust from the speeding duo cleared, Douglas Jay Falcon stood buck naked (except for his helmet) before Samus, with only his humble hands present to cover his super sexy manly privates from her eyes.

Samus, a little disgruntled at first, spat her hair out of her mouth, took one look at Falcon, and snapped her neck a hundred-and-eighty degrees away. "Eeeeewww! Put some clothes on, you dirty flasher!"

Falcon cast one disbelieving glance at the fully-clothed Samus. Then he looked down at himself, before turning his head up to the ceiling and weeping:

" _Why couldn't it be the other way around_?!"

* * *

Our chase continues outside the mansion, as a random girl from the Elite Beat Agent universe walks the street with her red tabby cat nestled comfortably in her arms.

"Don't you dare wander outside on your own this late at night again, do you hear me, Dorfclif?" the little girl gently chided at the mewling feline.

Customary cartoony cat-and-mouse chase involving Ness and Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron later, Dorfclif the red cat is gone from her arms.

"Dorfclif! They took my Dorfclif!" screamed the little girl, little droplets of tears oozing from the corners of her eyes.

Just as she was about to look to the heavens and cry "HEEEAAALP!", Ness and Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron ran right back behind her, and before she knew it she was looking up into the gigantic face of a familiar cat.

"Hi, Ylime! It's me, Dorfclif the Big Red Cat!" he said in a purr that shook the earth and made the poor little girl lose her footing and fall on her rear.

* * *

Tortimer, in his red Hawaiian shirt and classy top hat, ambled by with his trusty old cane, minding his own business on his nightly walk.

Peace and quiet, of course, were soon interrupted by the appearance of Ness and Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron behind him as they continued their mad dash through the outskirts of an Animal Crossing village.

For a while it seemed as though nothing had happened.

Then –

"My Type 2 diabetes," Tortimer gasped as he groped various parts of his torso, as though doing so allowed him to self-diagnose his whatever illness he was currently suffering, "it's gone! Oh, glorious day! My diabetes is _gone_! Why, I feel as young as a newly-born snapper in a pristine pond full of –"

Whatever the pristine pond was full of we will never know, for at that exact moment Ness and Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron chose to resume their crazy chase right behind him. The dust clouds cleared to reveal Tortimer, rocking to and fro on the back of his shell, eyes rolling to the back of his head as he suffers the immediate effects of Type 24 diabetes. From his mouth frothed forth tabs of toffee and slabs of chocolate – much to the delight of the other villagers, as they flock around his overflowing mouth for candy, candy, _candy_!

* * *

The chase, finally, concludes in the familiar sights of Yoshi's room. Ness, face flushed tomato red and drenched with profuse amounts of sweat, gasps and sputters as he slams the door behind him. His throat is parched, his tongue dry; his lungs burn with each gulp of air he heaves in. He sways for a while, the last lingering traces of energy providing futile balance to his legs. Then he collapses on Yoshi's dirt bed, and for a good five minutes Ness lies still, willing his explosive heart to settle down, settle _down_.

When at last he could breathe normally, Ness sat himself up, gulped in one last sputter of air, and took Yoshi out of his bag.

He couldn't bring himself to look into those dead button eyes.

At last he squeaked out: "Yo… Yoshi?"

Another pregnant pause of silence. Ness worked his shaky hand around the tongue and pulled.

 _Ness! Can you hear me? It's me, Yo…_

His voice faded away before the mechanism of his voice box allowed him to finish, but that was all the confirmation Ness needed.

"Yoshi!" He nearly squeezed the doll to his chest for a good two seconds, closing his eyes shut and rocking his upper body to and fro. Then his eyes snapped open, pupils constricted to mere dots, lips pursed in horror at what he was doing.

He immediately held Yoshi a good arm's length away and said, in a rather lame, feeble voice, "I mean. Uh. Thanks for wiping the sweat off of me…? Eh hehe."

He cleared his throat.

"Dude! Are you okay? What – what happened to you? How – I mean, what – just, what happened?"

He waited a second for a response before he remembered and pulled Yoshi's tongue.

 _Ness! Behind you!_

"N ** _n_** nE **e** e _E_ s _s_ **s** Ss ** _S_** s~" droned a familiar voice behind him.

"Oh, give me a fucking break!" Ness cried, nearly screamed in exasperation as he jumped up.

Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron jumped from the open window and approached Ness with the same deranged smile on its face. "He o **N** ly E _ee_ **evV** viil _l A_ al **l** iiE **e** N _Nn_ Din **O** s ** _s_** **s** a **a** a ** _U_** uR from **_V_** e **E** Ee _E_ nNn **n** u _u_ u **S** s **s** s. Ss _S_ _ **T**_ te **e** ea _a_ lL **ll** ** _Y_** o _o_ Uu **u** frOo _m_ m m _e_ e **E** e **e** E." Then, adopting the harshest, most distorted voice of all: **_LET ME KILL HIM._**

"First of all," Ness yelled as he got up, ensuring Yoshi was behind him before turning to face the Monkeytron, "He didn't steal _any_ thing from you! I was never yours to _begin_ with!" As the words tumbled out of his mouth, Ness readied his arms by his sides, conjuring an orb of fire and lightning in each hand. "Secondly, if you're going to kill him, you're gonna have to go through _me_ fir –"

ZAP! A second later and Ness was the size of an ant. He looked down at his tiny body, then behind at the tiny Yoshi doll sagging by his ankles, and finally up at the hulking figure of Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron towering above him.

Ness hunched his back, squared his shoulders, and sighed.

"Right. I forgot about that."

The Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron lowered the barrel of its vacuum gun, right in front of Ness's face. Ness looked into the opening to the cave of barren metallic smoothness leading into the depths of nothingness, and gulped.

Then there was a _whoosh_ and he and Yoshi were gone.


End file.
